It’s Gonna Blow!!!: What Happened When San Diego Didn’t ‘Happen’

San Diego band Drive Like Jehu in the music documentary It's Gonna Blow!!!

“We were supposed to be the next Seattle,” Tim Blankenship of San Diego bands Creedle and Rust says early in It’s Gonna Blow!!! San Diego’s Music Underground 1986-1996 “But eventually it didn’t work out that way.” He speaks not with anger or regret but with the bemusement of a guy who cheerfully admits later in the film that he churned out indifferent grunge-lite with one band to subsidize the eccentric music he made with another. In grunge’s early ’90s wake San Diego bands like Rocket from the Crypt and Drive Like Jehu brought the major labels in their droves to California’s southern tip, eager to stake a claim to the next alt-rock gusher. In the end, the only bands that really made it big out of San Diego were Stone Temple Pilots – only in the most nominal sense a San Diego band, as Bill Perrine’s music documentary has great fun hashing out – and Blink-182, whose brand of suburban pep-punk was a pale stepchild of a scene that was a good deal weirder and noisier in its day.

Just how weird and noisy provides the backdrop for It’s Gonna Blow!!!, which premiered last year (in San Diego, natch) and is in the closing days of a modest Kickstarter campaign mainly aimed at funding additional festival and special-event screenings and a DVD release. Among the punk/underground communities that sprouted across America in the ’80s, San Diego’s had more than most to push back against, struggling for air in a conservative town where the dominant industry is the US Navy. And it got more push-back than most, too: Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye and George Anthony of Battalion of Saints both recall San Diego as the most violent scene they encountered in their long years in the van.

The peculiar contours of San Diego’s civic culture produced a coterie of inventive misfit bands like Heavy Vegetable, the amateurish/intuitive Trumans Water (championed by the late, sainted British DJ John Peel), and the shamanistic Crash Worship alongside thrumming post-hardcore overdrive like Rocket from the Crypt, all of whom shared members and gig bills until things started getting strange. A kind of mirror image of Hype, Doug Pray’s 1996 chronicle of the Seattle explosion, It’s Gonna Blow!!! energetically and thoroughly documents the development of San Diego’s singularly motley scene and how it got through the invasion of the A&R men, who clearly didn’t know quite what they were getting as they sprayed contracts in every direction.

Hoping to build on the momentum of a dozen or so mostly West Coast screenings to date, Perrine and company are looking to raise $8,000 by March 26 to reach a wider audience, with an admirable focus on theaters (part of the Kickstarter haul will finance creating a DCP or Digital Cinema Package, the format now favored by festivals and movie houses). With a week to go they’re just past three-quarters of the way there. Click on the widget to to help them blow it over the top.